Author Games: Red Room

Task Seven: Jack DeWalch

On the frigid September night that Jack DeWalch fled the Hunters' forest, he left a number of important things behind him, either because he had lost them entirely or because he could not bear to drag them back into the light of civilization. One of these things was his pride, irretrievably buried beneath broken guitar strings and tainted apples and three identical snow-white suits; another was his sense of righteousness, the overflowing confidence that years of living without drastic personal consequence had instilled within him. The last of these was the dead body of Abigail Hobbes-Brigante, and it was the worst thing that Jack left in the Hunters' forest because it was not his to abandon—Abigail had never belonged to him, not in life and certainly not in a death that Jack hadn't meant to invoke, yet he deserted both the incinerated corpse and the accompanying guilt in the same shaded grove that the Hunters had inhabited only minutes before, and he thought that it was for the best. Once he'd located the police in the nearest inhabited town, and once he'd explained the trials his tormentors had forced him to endure, the body and the guilt and all the other forgotten things might be uncovered, and Jack could become his former self again, prideful and righteous and guilty all in one. But for now, at least, Jack could afford to be nothing but a fugitive, with all the quiet traits that running from a religious cult entailed. He'd be fearful and wary, humble and yet shrewd, and he'd crawl away from dangers that he might have tackled head-on had he been a different man. (Of course, Jack had no way of knowing that in accepting this sort of transformation, he'd be adopting it permanently; he could not predict that his pride and his righteousness and the body of his former girlfriend, once relinquished, would be lost for good.)

But all of this took place later in the evening, and Jack's escape began much earlier, after the body of Abigail Hobbes-Brigante had become a sickly mixture of melted flesh and bone and the Hunters had fled cryptically into the trees in the minutes that had followed. Whispering amongst themselves as they departed, their masks still strapped to their faces and their bows and javelins fastened to their backs, they melted into the woods just as thunder rolled overhead and the lingering flames of Abigail's funeral pyre were doused by sudden rainfall. As Jack slumped sullenly in the ashy muck surrounding the bonfire, those whispers continued to snake through his sluggish thoughts—"Judas," the masked women had murmured, uttering the name with something between revulsion and fear, "Judas and its pawns." Jack did not know a Judas, nor did he comprehend the haste that its mention imbued in the white-robed women, but he understood the implications—with the cultists preoccupied by their own concerns, Jack would remain alone in this forest for a long while, and his likelihood of escape would drastically increase. If he wanted to escape (which he desperately did, despite the shock and guilt that had shrouded him since Abigail's death), he would need to do it immediately, or else his window of opportunity might slam shut for good and he'd be trapped in a hellish, psychosis-inducing forest for the rest of his life.

After this realization, the plan shuffled itself into place almost mechanically. The left half of his brain, orderly and goal-oriented as it had always been, found it easy to assemble the details of his stay into a reliable strategy: locate the apple grove, continue south into uncharted territory, hope that a road or river materializes in those parts of the woods that Jack had not yet explored. Yet the right half of his brain dragged its feet, still fixated on visions of the future that he feared were no longer possible and visions of the immediate past that he wished he could forget. The smell of Abigail's burned flesh still wafted through the air, reminiscent of rancid meat and melted plastic in a way that made Jack's stomach churn, and he forced himself to concentrate on more beautiful things, namely the life he planned to lead once he'd escaped the forest's frigid confines. And as he charted the physical route that he would trace through the woods that night, Jack simultaneously charted the emotional route that he would travel after he'd escaped, after the aspens and packed earth had turned to skyscrapers and concrete and the perpetual reminders of his wrongdoings had all but disappeared.